Sword of Faith
by thepkrmgc
Summary: In a world unscarred by the grail war a blade is forged, the fires are no less hot for their lack of magic.
1. Chapter 1

Sword of Faith.

In a world unscarred by the grail war a blade is forged, the fires are no less hot for their lack of magic. A boy staggers through the streets of his burning city, the fragments of his past falling away amid the radioactive ash. Yet in the smoke a smiling face appears, shining near as bright as that second sun. And for a moment, a boy in hell wonders if there just might be a god after all: before the pain whisks him away to dream of swords.

Emiya Kiritsugu had been involved in the project since its inception: dreaming of a weapon to end the war, to end all wars. He never wondered why his "companion" was so eager to play the servant... He should have known that even if there was a road to that distant utopia it wouldn't be _her_ that lit the way. The deceiver earned her name, but her lies paled in comparison to the ones he told himself. Yet for all the years that he had walked that left hand path Kiritsugu's will was yet his own. From a bunker in the distance he saw the fruits of his good intentions, and could not look away.

Something snapped within his clockwork mind and the last thing his comrades hear is the clink of silver hitting the floor before their body's join it. Were he a better man he'd have given then a chance to share in his redemption, but he was never a Swordsman: their path was never his own. And so he ran into the hellfire with a pistol in hand and a prayer on his lips, begging for a chance to prevent anyone else from paying the price of his hubris. To prove that for all he had stared into the abyss he did not dwell there, or else slay the monster that lurked behind familiar eyes.

For most, all he can give is mercy: and for every soul he drags out of the fires hundreds more die in agony. Standing at the hypo-center of the blast, despair bringing him to his knees where flame could not: he sees a toddler stumbling amid the city of the dead, kissed by fire yet alive. And that glimmer of hope is enough to spark a dream of redemption. He adopts the boy and calls him Shirou: they both know that bonds of blood are unnecessary for a family forged of steel. His old estate sees more smiles as a makeshift hospital than it ever did as a home, and if anyone notices how he winces at their gratitude, they are polite enough not to mention it.

He isn't surprised to see a familiar foe after the smoke clears, he has fought enough knights to know that if the need is great enough one shall appear. It is she that hears his confession, she who retrieves the coins from where he in his guilt had dared not tread. He's not the first to set aside the silver. And for all that they are in the redemption business the knights aren't stupid: they know that the Lion likes to make an example of those who leave his flock. And so a polite fiction is established, where "friend of the family" comes to mean some strange cross between witness protection and parole officer. There's too much bad blood between them, too much resentment and lingering mistrust for the word "friend" to ever ring true.

Of all the titles he has accumulated over decades of strife "dad" is the one he is proudest of, it reminds him of the family he left behind all those years ago. He tells his son stories of heroes, of the bravest men and women he ever met: and if Shirou never learns that his beloved father played the villain in his tales? Well… another lie could hardly stain his soul any blacker.

Shirou never shows any signs of magic, but he takes it in stride: who wants to be a hedge mage when you could be a hero? He begs his father to train him, and while he was surprised how little convincing it took: he honestly didn't expect his first "mission" to involve volunteering at a soup kitchen. Once the lesson sinks in the real training starts, Kiritsugu knows that while most of humanities ills are best fought with kindness, some must be battled with cold steel and hot lead.

The cancer comes on slowly, a subtler assassin than it's victim, and at first the symptoms were so easy to explain away. Kiritsugu was always a rather pale individual so if he was paler then usual he just hadn't gotten enough sun. If he bruised easily and was tired and was tired and sore well that was just a consequence of sparring with his overenthusiastic son. He was hardly the only one with such symptoms: it was just a virus spreading among the hibakusha until it suddenly wasn't. By the time they realize it's leukemia Kiritsugu isn't long for the world.

Shirou swears to be a hero as his father breathes his last but heroism is a nebulous thing, in real life the monsters don't stand around in the open waiting to be slain. Under the light of day things that once seemed so certain can be excused as the fantasies of a childish mind. But never forgets his fathers stories, and tries to match his heroes in spirit if not in deed. So what if they call him "fake janitor"? He knew he was a Good Man. Perhaps he would have been nothing more then that, but Lion's memory is long: the Denarians would Return to Fuyuki, and the fate of the world would rest upon the point of a sword…

(Author note: I don't know how common of a name Shirou/Shiro is in Japan, but I mean seriously: two of fictions most epic swordsmen sharing a name like that cannot be a coincidence, especially since both the dresden and nasuverse have the whole alternate reality thing going on in the background.)


	2. Chapter 2

p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;" align="center"Sword of Faith/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;" align="center"Chapter Two/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;" align="left"If there was a god, Rin concluded: then It was bipolar in the extreme. To have escaped the fiery birth of the atomic age only to find herself so terribly alone once the smoke cleared. To have been the latest in the proud Tohsaka legacy, to have inherited the power to bend the fundamental forces of the universe to her will: only for that power to condemn her to years of Kotomine's "tutelage". So she clung to her books and cleverness, trying to structure her life like the geometric certainty of her gems. No matter how hollow it felt behind that icy mask./p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;" align="left"They found her mangled amid the ashes and told her that she had been blessed by the touch of their lord. That she would receive the honor of being counted among his squires when the time was right. That if she served truly and well she might one day be chosen to receive the touch of an angel. Most of them said nothing at all: the desiccated remains of their tongues clacking away in some hideous mockery of laughter. Something inside her broke then, as her liege and his daughter waltzed amid the flames and called it paradise. But as agony slowly overcame her consciousness she noticed that all was not well in their twisted world. Cries of treason and a glimpse of a golden glow in the distance that would haunt Sakura's dreams for years to come./p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;"Nicodemus has been twisting souls for thousands of years, and Sakura never possessed her sister's defiant resolve: she is easy prey for the roaring lion. A sister who mourned her dearly was said to be celebrating her demise. The death of her uncle Kariya, who had survived the bomb only to be executed by her supposed rescuers, was laid at her feet as he allegedly dove in front of the blast for her sake. Yet perhaps it was the most mundane of insults that hurt the most. Every day she was told that she was ugly, that she was broken and disfigured, that nobody could ever love someone who looked so hideously burned. In time she started to believe them, and fear and longing began to mix with anger and resentment./p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;"Then, as if to salt the wound, she was sent back into the city of her twin births. To observe and report they said. All with the utmost secrecy and ever-present knowledge that she was being watched in turn, that putting so much as a foot out of line would earn her a traitors death with all the trappings that her master had so long perfected. But she still froze when she saw her sister after so long a parting, Rin's ivory skin a sharp contrast to her own patchwork road-map of agony. As she lost herself amid the maelstrom of twisted emotions and lies, Sakura hardly noticed as her sisters azure eyes met the lavender of her own for oh so brief a moment before narrowing slightly and turning away: the ghost of a tear upon her frozen face./p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;"Smiles make people feel better, or so Kiritsugu had said, and while he never felt any particular need to smile for his own sake. The fire would not let him forget the smile of his own salvation and he could not bring himself to disagree. So he smiled constantly: even if the joy he projected never truly reached his eyes. Though occasionally considered creepy or suspicious, his detractors could find no fault with his actions. most rationalized it as a tragic effect of overexposure to the Tiger of Fuyuki, or at least as brain damage from her "enthusiastic" training regimen and that terrifying thing she called a shinai./p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;"His smile baffled her: she'd read the dossier, she saw the scars that mirrored her own. She'd been told that the betrayer's life was a cursed existence and the world had paid the price. And yet his son; who had ample reason to curse his father's name instead embraced it, with nary a thought to the name he'd left behind. It perplexed her, and intrigued her, and a dozen other things. She had to know more and so she donned another mask, a porcelain personality to veil the shadows beneath. She told herself that she could better observe from up close than afar, that the knife in the back struck truer than the bolt from the blue. The Lion laughed, for his was the reign of shadows: and he knew that true despair is only found amid the ashes of shattered dreams./p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;"Rin had total control of the situation the entire time, and since any hint to the contrary resulted in emthe glare/em there wasn't anyone about to disagree. Of course the proper response to discovering a mysterious set of wards around Homurahara was to investigate them alone at night. So what if they smelled like brimstone? This was her city and the stars would fall from the sky before she had to involve a washed out old warden like Kotomine: what did he know anyway? She meant to disrupt that runic tripwire, and knew that doing so would attract the attention of whatever insolent cur that dared to leave inch deep claw marks in solid concrete like a common delinquent./p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;"Admittedly, they were a great deal uglier then she had expected, and bigger, much much bigger, and surprisingly gandr resistant to boot. She didn't scream, it was a warcry: if anything it should have been the one screaming. It took more than some big blue hound to scare her, even if its two sets of eyes burned with a brighter crimson than her favorite coat and more light than a thousand suns, it was practically a puppy. She knew better than to freeze up like a deer in the headlights and look the thing in the eyes: there was no soulgaze and it wouldn't haunt her nightmares for decades to come. She didn't run away it was a tactical retreat, and she didn't trip either: she meant to jump off the roof and don't you dare think otherwise!/p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;"Ok so she might have been in some trouble if Sabrina hadn't parked her truck emjust there/em, or hadn't been lugging some mattresses in the back. She had a spell ready to push enough air down to slow her descent: so what if it was more like a hair dryer than a jet-pack. it's just a matter of scale right? Ms Pendragon was certainly skilled with that broadsword she carried, but the Hound of Culann had clearly fled at the mere thought of facing a magus of her supreme arcane power. By that point things had gotten rather fuzzy and the mattress was surprisingly comfortable, so she may or may not have passed out in the back of the truck feeling somewhat sympathetic for humpty dumpty. Though her ears rung like some infernal chimes, she heard the blonde Knight mutter something about a concussion and the need to get behind a threshold before sleep claimed her./p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;" /p  
p style="margin-bottom: 0in; line-height: 150%;"(Authors note: sorry guys but as awesome as Archer is he will not be appearing in this fic: I hope you like my interpretation of the prologue without him! Thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed: enjoy!)/p 


End file.
